I generally see it the way medved does, but the evidence is not quite as reassuring as we would like it to be. In fact, there is some doubt. I'll put some comments in green in a copy of your initial post.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adoh

I don't masturbate and don't have sex, I'm only 17. I haven't masturbated in years and I haven't had any wet dreams. Can this give me cancer?

The only cancer where I've heard of a possible link is prostate cancer, and I suspect you have heard a verson of the link too.

First off, IF such lack of sexual activity does contribute to prostate cancer, it appears the link is fairly weak, if it exists at all. This has actually been studied, and you can view for free abstracts (meaning "brief summary descriptions") of the studies by going to a site we are allowed to use on this board because it is Government sponsored: www.pubmed.gov . Then enter this search string: " prostate cancer AND masturbation " (without the quotation marks). I just did that and the result was nine hits, a number which will increase as new studies are published. At the moment some of the nine don't look relevant, but take a look at hits 1, 3 and 6. You can view the abstract by clicking on the blue hypertext title for a paper.

Personally, I suspect there is some fairly weak contribution to prostate cancer risk from what you might think of as "bottled up" semen that is not released fairly frequently. It seems to me that's what some of the studies are leaning toward, though they shy away from that conclusion. I once heard the highly respected prostate cancer researcher Dr. Bill Nelson, MD, from Johns Hopkins, speculate that that could be the case. Basically, he noted that semen was pretty potent stuff biologically and that it might, over years, injure body tissue in contact with it if not released fairly frequently.

I've seen threads about seman coming out after urination due to the overflow of it. It's happened to me which really freaked me out.

I strongly doubt that that is any problem at all. Actually, that is probably a normal way of releasing semen that has built up. (That's my layman's speculation; I've had no enrolled medical education.)

So can this lead to prostate cancer?

At the moment, the accurate answer is that no one knows for certain, and my impression is that no one is very confident in their views one way or the other. Hopefully that may change as further research is done. Some of the authors of the three papers are highly respected researchers, and I'm confident this question will draw further attention. It's actually a really important question; just think of the attention that would follow a firm research finding that did link bottling up of semen to prostate cancer.

Hope this helps, and please come back with any followup questions you have, especially about understanding the numbers, abbreviations and phrases in the study abstracts. It's not that complicated, but the medical jargon takes some getting used to.